Prepare for Gingerbread Fun!
Life is full and busy, blogging doesn’t seem to be within my scope right now. That said, I need a place to communicate some information and a lot of pictures to some homeschool buddies, so using my blog is a no brainer location.
In a slightly desperate move to bring some of the freedom from life on the road to life in the same place every.single.day, I decided to host weekly field trips for our homeschool group. We’ve been to the Navel Museum, Theo Chocolate’s Factory tour, The Seattle Art Museum, The Cedar River Watershed Education Center, a pumpkin patch, in search of spawning salmon at a local park, and more. This week, we’re bringing the fun and adventure to my house for a group of 20 of us to decorate gingerbread houses. I’m expecting sweet, sticky, excited chaos in everyone corner of my home! Feel free to take a peek at our communications. Maybe it will inspire you to have a gingerbread house day, too!
I want to give you an advance preview of what’s to come on Thursday and put out some decorating ideas for you to think over in hopes that we can step more quickly into decorating on Thursday when you arrive.
A few logistical details:
- This is a long event and the house will be FULL of people and activity. Feel free to take a breather with your kiddos - maybe a quiet walk or brisk run around the block if needed.
- I’ll be starting us out with an orientation meeting to talk over basic how-to’s. Please try to arrive on time. We will have the house mostly set and ready to go when you arrive. I would REALLY appreciate if folks would plan to help clean up at the end. I’ll initiate cleanup activities about 3:30. If you need to leave early, let me know and we’ll see if we can find some early clean up tasks for you.
- Sugar, sugar everywhere!! Two things about this. First, it is my strong preference that folks ask their kids not to consume too much as they work. In part because they’ll be eating our raw materials and in part because it is hard to think or control one’s hands, body, or tongues when totally hopped up on sugar. I’m offering to my kids that they can have a FEW pieces of candy as they work - as in 3 or 4 (I won’t be policing this much, though). Secondly, I’ve found it pays well to provide my kids (any myself) with lots of nourishing snack while decorating. Creative thinking actually takes quite a bit of brain power as does resisting all that sugary goodness. A full belly makes everything easier. (Please remember we’re having a nut FREE day).
- Gingerbread house decorating is a community creative effort. Feel free to look at what others are doing for inspiration and remember that imitation is the highest form of flattery! I’ll be available to help if someone gets stuck or needs ideas. I encourage you to have a ready helping hand if your neighbor needs one.
- Gingerbread and icing can be unpredictable. Even the day’s weather can affect it. Be ready for moments of frustration when something won’t behave the way you want or look quite how you imagined. My experience is that after a good night’s sleep, my house looks delightful to me. This is a great opportunity to practice using our flexible parts, our problems solving parts, and our creative making a new plan parts!
- Again, there will be a lot of folks in the house. Still I hope each of us gets lost in our own little decorating worlds as much as possible.
Our recipes, templates, directions, and the ideas I’m going to share today come from Christa Currie’s delightful and very thorough book “Gingerbread Houses.” Her book has been the basis for many successful Barnacle gingerbread houses and a week long “gingerbread house” camp that I helped plan for the group years ago.
Several folks have been baking like crazy so that we have the gingerbread pieces ready on Thursday, allowing us the luxury of time for decorating. I offer them a million thank you’s!!
To assemble the house we will be using the pre-baked pieces, merengue powered icing (which sets HARD pretty quickly), and a variety of candies, cookies, cereal and whatever else our daring shoppers come up with! I will have a few icing bags with tips on hand, otherwise the clever C. knows how to make icing bags out of ziplock bags. If you’ve never used an icing bag, do not fear. It is pretty simple and there is no such thing as a mistake when decorating gingerbread. Just another creative opportunity to use another piece of candy!
We will start by assembling the walls of the house. I will have more detailed instructions on Thursday. We will: 1. assemble the walls 2. add the roof 3. assemble the chimney.
Once the house is put together, we’ll move on to the decorating phase. The trick to making a really great looking house is to cover ALL the rough seams and edges with either candies or icing. Gingerbread houses look better with MORE stuff, so aim to cover as much surface as you can in creative ways!
Currie recommends starting with 1. the walls (seams, door designs, window designs, for example) 2. add porch lights, doorbells, garlands 3. decorate the roof and chimney 3. yard work and fence come last so we don’t have to reach over and around them.
I’m going to give you a few ideas to stew over here, but I also don’t want you to worry. My goal here is to put some thoughts in your mind to contemplate what *you* think would be fun so that your creative juices are already flowing a bit when you arrive on Thursday (blank minds are welcome, but can also be a bit frustrating for the person who has one). Some of my favorite touches have popped into my brain as I was staring at a blank spot on a wall or “yard” wondering what would be fun.
Take a look at the different components below and notice in particular the ways Currie uses various pieces to create a whole - like the mailbox example below uses a tootsie roll, a pretzel, and some decorative icing.
We’ll be creating our own doors (rather than using gingerbread pieces). Doors can be drawn out of icing or made out of things like pretzels, cereal, or candy pieces. You might want a front and a back door. Maybe a cat door?
Again, we’ll be creating this ourselves. How many windows do you want? Does your house have an attic window? Or maybe a small window for your pet owl to fly in and out? Another question to ask yourself is, do you want your windows to look simply decorative or do you want them to give “peek” into whatever is going on inside, like the Christmas tree example below?
You’ll have several different options for chimneys. We’ll have baked pieces to build a chimney with. Or you can carefully cut an ice cream cone to serve as your chimney. Or, you could skip the chimney entirely! (The church picture below features and ice cream cone steeple).
This is one of my favorite parts to decorate. There are so many options! The flat part can be tiled with Necco wafers or cereal pieces, shingled with cereal or pretzels, designed with icing, or just simply spotted with random candy pieces. Besides the flat surface, consider how you might like to decorate the peak of your roof and the edges. And finally the bottom edge - icicles or no icicles?
Do you want shutters for your windows?
Stairs up to the front door? (You’ll need to decide this early, before you create your door).
What details does the home you live in have that you’d like to include?
This is my other favorite part. The boards we have as bases are 10x20. The houses are 8x6.5. Think of this as a long, skinny city lot. Do you want your house at the front with a large back yard, placed the back with a long front yard, or smack dab in the middle?
Ideas for the yard include a mailbox, trees, bushes, potted plants, lamp posts, a path, a woodpile, fences, and a gate. My brain keeps trying to figure out how i could build a dog house.
Here are a few images from the book to help you understand what it might look like all put together. Remember, these are artist’s renditions of the ideal a master gingerbread maker put together! Our will look much more homemade, real, and delicious.
theartofmadeline
stormborns
izzy806